Next week: Everything I have ever put into my mouth

Yesterday brought the first full day of heat and light
we’ve had here since…oh, 1962.
I spent hours digging in the dirt, and by late afternoon
had weeded the gardens nearest the house – and a few inside my head.
A real relief that; I’ve got some overgrowth that needs to be pruned.
Working hard is as close as I ever get to meditation, and even then I
seem to require a subject on which to center myself. Apparently there’s
no shutting off my mind; only a refining of the usual mad roar.
My distillation this day: hands.

I’ve had the same pair of hands for almost 50 years.
They’re fairly unremarkable, rather blunt; some might say mannish.
The nails are horrid, chewed ragged more often than not, and my knuckles
are usually bruised or cut from some job I’ve used the wrong tools to do.
They are just hands, two flappy, fleshy wings hanging from my wrists,
old and used and similar to millions of others all around the world.
But they do have a story all their own.
They’ve made art, made love, made quilts and dioramas and
shoes out of yellow duct tape. They’ve held brand new babies,
washed the face of death, uncovered hidden treasure and offered sacrament.
With them, I’ve fed deer and goats and horses and a crow, shaved legs
and faces and parts of a sheep. Made bread and pasta, jam and stew,
smashed spiders and flies and one diamond engagement ring.
Caught a trout in a creek, chopped my hair off in a rage,
played the piano badly while my teacher smacked my knuckles with a ruler,
broken every plate in the house and grabbed a red-tailed hawk
as it hung tangled in a mist-net.
My hands have wiped up blood and shit and mercury, written hate mail,
poetry and three paragraphs to present to the Utah State Legislature.
They’ve held up evidence for the jury in a federal court trial,
taken a stolen oil lamp back from a shoplifting Hell’s Angel,
and one of them has helped to artificially inseminate a cow.
They once held a pound of pot, a human lung,
and the Nazi flag my father pulled
from a storefront somewhere during the war.
Over the years, my hands have folded and mutilated,
tweezed and braided, burned, doused, slapped, cradled, lent,
borrowed, stolen, returned, ruined, rescued, and more.
They’ve slapped the blackened ground
where suicide left a loved one alone to decompose, and later,
flung his ashes into a creek that ran nearby.
They’ve traced petroglyphs carved in stone 9,000 years ago,
taken an award from the poet William Stafford and nearly gotten
me booted out of Seattle's Art Museum by reaching once too often
toward an exhibit marked “DO NOT TOUCH”.
They’ve been dipped in paint, shoved in snow, bathed in wax,
covered in vomit and stuck to the back of a station wagon with super glue.
Whether raised in retaliation, frozen with fear, moved by pity,
wrung with anguish, clenched in anger or flung wide with abandon -
they continue to do whatever I ask. How incredible is that?
How miraculous, how grand.


I began writing this late Sunday, and received the following message from my daughter yesterday.
“Dear Mom – Did you read what happened to DG? His Bradly tank got
blown up in Iraq. He has third degree burns on 90% of his body, and his
legs were too burned and the doctors cut them off.
Now one of his hands has been cut off too. Mom, he is only 19 years old.”
I could take the time to comment here on so many issues – but really, what’s the point? I think, instead, I’ll dedicate this ‘ode to hands’ to DG, with a prayer that his journey through agony be blessedly brief.



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